AIDS, like so many other epidemics before it, has posed a tremendous
challenge to the global public-health establishment, but it has also s
a uniquely tortured history that has been riddled with missed
opportunities and bad decisions. When AIDS first appeared in the
United States, federal funding for AIDS research was a contentious
issue due to a perceived connection between AIDS and homosexuality,
and homophobic sentiment impeded government action on AIDS until the
eventual appearance of AIDS in the heterosexual population removed
some of AIDS’s stigma. Then, two decades later, South African
President Thabo Mbeki based his nation’s public health response to
AIDS on the demonstrably false belief, advocated by the American
biologist Peter Duesberg, that HIV was not the cause of AIDS, causing
untold damage.
This thesis analyzes the social dimensions of the global AIDS
epidemic, paying special attention to the pseudoscience that shaped
government AIDS policy in South Africa. Through a comparative analysis
with other pseudoscientific movements, a taxonomy of pseudoscience is
assembled. We see that pseudoscience owes much of its popularity to a
mistrust of science and to a perception that scientific consensus is
somehow unreliable; additionally, the rise of the internet has
facilitated the circulation of pseudoscience and has made it likely
that, going forward, pseudoscientific movements will play an
increasingly prominent role in debates over, and the formulation of,
scientific policy.